6 October 2026 (Tuesday)
Preconference study visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum
A special study visit including areas not available to the public, including Block 10 with limited number of places available.
7:00 Departure from Kraków
9:00–14:00 Study visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum
15:00 Lunch
16:00-17:00 “Negatives of memory. Labyrinths” — artwork exhibition by Marian Kołodziej, Auschwitz survivor
ca. 18:30-19:00 Return to Kraków
7 October 2026 (Wednesday)
Conference
8:00–9:00 Registration
9:00 Opening
Welcome addresses
Piotr Gajewski MD PhD (President, Polish Institute for Evidence Based Medicine, Poland)
Prof. Maciej Małecki MD PhD (Vice-Rector for Medical College, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland)
Konrad Graczyk PhD (Deputy Director of Office for Historical Research, National Institute of Remembrance, Poland)
Keynote speech
Leon Weintraub MD PhD (Sweden) – Guest of Honor, survivor of Nazi German concentration camps
Session I · 9:30–11:20
9:30-10:10 Opening lecture: When healers became killers: How medicine and medical ethics provided the rationale for the path to Auschwitz
Tessa Chelouche MD (Department of Bioethics and the Holocaust, International Chair in Bioethics – WMA Cooperation Center, Israel)
10:10-10:30 Could science save in Auschwitz Camp?
Teresa Wontor-Cichy PhD (State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oświęcim, Poland)
10:30-10:50 Doctors in the context of perpetrator research: Medical professionals as perpetrators and accomplices
Thorsten Wagner PhD (Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics – FASPE, USA)
10:50-11:20 Panel discussion
Moderator: David Goldman (FASPE, USA)
11:20-11:40 Refreshment break
Session II · 11:40–13:10
11:40-12:00 Split memory: New insights into persecution and commemoration of the tuberculosis experiments of Kurt Heißmeyer in the Neuengamme concentration camp
Anna von Villiez PhD (Memorial and educational centre Israelitische Töchterschule / The City of Hamburg’s Commissioner for Jewish Life and the Combating and Prevention of Antisemitism, Germany)
12:00-12:20 The fate of the 55 Jewish women deported from France on Convoy 58 who arrived at Block 10 in August 1943
Johanna Lehr PhD (USC Shoah Foundation, USA)
12:20-12:40 Surviving Mengele’s Auschwitz: The story of Kalman and Leopold
Richard K. Lowy (Author of the book Kalman & Leopold: Surviving Mengele’s Auschwitz, Canada)
12:40-13:10 Panel discussion
Moderator: Prof. Rebecca Brendel MD (Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics, USA)
13:10-14:10 Lunch break
Session III · 14:10-15:40
14:10-14:30 How medicine came up during the Wannsee conference
Hans-Christian Jasch PhD (Independent researcher, Germany)
14:30-14:50 Analysis of the relationship between deliberate neglect and high mortality rates among polish infants in Care Facilities for Foreign Children 1939-1945
Karolina Trzeskowska-Kubasik PhD (National Institute of Remembrance, Poland)
14:50-15:10 Moral orientations in medicine: Lessons from the Kinderfachabteilungen
Prof. Jay Malone MD (Washington University School of Medicine, USA)
15:10-15:40 Panel discussion
Moderator: Prof. Matthew Wynia MD (CU Anschutz Center for Bioethics and Humanities, University of Colorado, USA)
15:40-16:40 Dinner
8 October 2026 (Thursday)
Workshops
Venue: Jagiellonian University Medical College, address: Świętej Anny 12, Kraków (see on map)
Workshop I · 9:30-10:45
Care in Context: End-of-Life Decisions and Public Policy in Global Perspective
Roger Chung (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Rebecca Brendel (Harvard Medical School, USA)
Workshop description
As we are increasingly able to prolong life, physicians, patients, and caregivers around the world are grappling with clinical, ethical, and legal questions surrounding decision-making at the end of life. This workshop will highlight the example of evolving developments in Hong Kong, the US, and beyond as lenses to explore the continuum of considerations from decision-making about withdrawing and withholding care to the contours and context of medically-assisted death and euthanasia. Critical ethical considerations about when, if ever, physician participation in causing death ought to be permissible/ available will be explored in the context of concerns regarding human and social implications of various practices. What, if any, provisions ought to be required to ensure that end-of-life decisions promote respect for individual humanity and are not coercive with respect to other societal considerations (implicitly or explicitly). Finally, as we reflect on our work together in Poland at the MRA conference, what if any echoes from the Nazi T4 program are discernable in our contemporary thought and practice from which we can learn?
Workshop II · 11:00-12:15
Exploring the potential of search and identification work for war victims inside the Office of Search and Identification of the Institute of National Remembrance
Aleksandra Baryła
Angelika Słodka
(Institute of National Remembrance – Office of Search and Identification, Poland)
Workshop description
This session introduces the work of a multidisciplinary team—historians, archaeologists, forensic experts, and geneticists—who investigate burial sites of victims of totalitarian repression (1917–1990). Operating across Poland and abroad, the Office of Search and Identification aims to restore public memory and dignity to those erased by communist regimes.
Workshop III · 12:30-13:45
Ambition and Atrocity: The Collaboration of the Gynecologist Carl Clauberg and the Chemist Johannes Goebel (Schering) in Human Experimentation at Auschwitz
Thorsten Wagner (Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics, USA)
Workshop description
The workshop will explore various paths leading to Auschwitz. Block 10 became the point of convergence for very different professional careers. The medical crimes committed at the camp provide a lens, a window into various forms of historical complicity – medical, professional, corporate – and their contemporary implications for professional ethics today. We will look at individual career choices and organizational dynamics and explore how the transformation of moral norms and the momentum of surprisingly quotidian, ordinary motives can converge and lead to previously unimaginable crimes overseen by professionals. What does these dynamics mean for us today?
14:00 Dinner
